Key figure of mobility: the pedestrian

Abstract

writings of the act of walking have spoken to anthropologists and other scholars in different ways since their publication. In the field of mobility studies, his emphasis on practice provides the foundation for a range of work on everyday experience in the constitution of urban life. 'The pedestrian' appears as a person who enunciates tactics in resistance to the gazing strategies of the planner. Yet for de Certeau the action of being is more important than the categorical identification of a type of actor. I read his use of 'pedestrian' in an adjectival sense, in that figures (including figures of speech) may have pedestrian qualities. From this perspective, walking speaks through its gestures. I explore these themes by drawing on a collaborative fieldwork project of walking along small urban rivers in Scotland, where the river environments provide a relief from merging of seeing and reading that occupies the walker along the street. Working with a poet enabled consideration of the generative capacity of language and gesture beyond de Certeau's sense of the enunciative.

Key figure of mobility: the tourist

“…Like the pilgrim, a key ingredient of the concept is the tour, the definitional necessity to return to a home. This differentiates the tourist from the nomad (see Engebrigtsen , this issue), as well as the flâneur (see Coates , this issue) and the pedestrian (see Vergunst , this issue), who move without reference to a home. The tourist also differs from both the crusader and the (itinerant) trader who, though both may return home, have very different and defined motivations.…”

Tactics of association

“…The current climate of global turmoil, uncertainty and discontent presents an important moment in which anthropologists can enrich their understanding of what Jo Vergunst (: 19) recently described as ‘the sense of the tactical in everyday life’. My interest in tactics as conceptual and ethnographic objects emerged during my year of fieldwork with thalassaemia patients in Cyprus.…”